iPhone App Impression: Inside Xbox

The Zumobi Network brings us a nifty little application that allows Xbox 360 users to view an simplified version of their Xbox Dashboard. Once logged in with your gamertag the app analyzes your game activity and displays your reputation, gamerscore, last played games, and recently unlocked achievements. Details on your friends are also available. Aside from personal stats, the mini-Dashboard has categories in News, Community, Videos, and the Dew Tour.

Aestetics
Visually Inside Xbox looks phenomenal. It perfectly captures the flow of the actual Xbox Dashboard. You scroll vertically and horizontally with your finger just as if you were navigating with your joystick. The colors match, the category placements are exact, and everything is where you’d expect to find them. The app runs smoothly with no hick ups and load times are kept to a minimum by only updating sections you are currently visiting (tested on a wireless 3G connection).

Content
Inside Xbox covers: News, Community, Videos, and the Dew Tour at the moment. The News section highlights numerous stories involving upcoming games, announcements, sweepstakes, and more. The news is interesting and worthwhile, but doesn’t update frequently enough for it to be useful source of up to date information. Thankfully the Community category keeps its news fresh, as it is directly connected with the Xbox Live Community Blog and Major Nelson. Through the Major Nelson section you can access Xbox Live Marketplace via a Safari pop-up and, if you’re logged in, can have your Xbox remotely download demos and full games. The Videos section is the worst category of the bunch, here the content is completely out of date. The most recent clips are from last years E3, the majority of which have already been released. During my 3 weeks time with Inside Xbox this section has not been updated with new content. Lastly, we have the Dew Tour tab. The Winter Dew Tour ended in December so the content is obviously old, but the content within the section was full of interesting articles, official blogs, and Twitter feeds about the extreme sport showdown.

Value
While not all the content is current, the application is free, so there’s some forgiveness there. If Inside Xbox cost anything, even a mere .99 it might not be worth it, based on the creators neglect towards fresh content. But since it’s a free application that does many things its premium competitors do, and at no cost, it is well worth the time it takes to download.

What it lacks
Inside Xbox is great as a stripped down version of the Xbox dashboard, the problem is that sometimes it’s a bit too simple. The features it makes available (friends list, game activity, recent achievements) are too shallow to be of any real use. For instance, you can only view whether or not your friends are online, not specifically what they are playing. On top of that you are unable to send them messages. The recent achievements only shows you how many achievements you or your friends have earned. It does not detail what was accomplished in order to unlock them, nor can you view the full list of achievements from a game in order see which you should work towards next. A lack of updated content is a application wide problem, with exception to the Community category. Timely news, videos, and promos would benefit the application immensely.

Verdict
Inside Xbox offers some neat features and has the best user interface in its category. It serves its purpose as a quick distraction when you’ve checked Facebook for the billionth time a day, but falls short at being the end all stop for up to date Xbox 360 news.